Killers
by Rayndrop
Summary: 1-5, "Rise from the Ashes." Seven very different people reflect on what it's like to kill somebody. A series of vignettes.
1. Ema Skye

I. Ema Skye

Ema cannot imagine what it's like to kill someone.

She can't, no matter how she tries. She lies in bed the night after the first day of the trial—the chilly, empty house that she'd let herself into with her key—and tries. She lets into her mind the picture that Angel Starr had painted in court, lets it in after trying so hard all day to keep it out. She mouths words at the dark ceiling that had echoed in the courtroom: _Stabbed him in the chest._ _Blood on the defendant's coat. Plunged it in over and over._

She raises her hand above her face in the dark, and wraps her fingers around the hilt of an invisible knife. She does not move the hand in a mimic of stabbing—she cannot make herself. But she pictures as precisely, as scientifically as she can, ramming the knife into a person. She wonders if it would break the ribs, or slide between them. She imagines blood splattering on clothes and face. Detective Goodman's blood.

No. She can't imagine it. Her mind rebels, hastily erasing the picture, so she stops trying to see the moment of violence and focuses only on the fact of death.

Mr. Goodman is dead. She squints at the ceiling, straining to understand that completely. Mr. Goodman is dead. He is never going to walk again, or breathe, or clock in for the day at the police station. He is never going to pass by her waiting outside her sister's office and say, "Hey there, squirt. How've you been?" He is cold, and dark, and still. She imagines herself making that happen. She imagines her sister making that happen.

No. She decides for the one millionth time that it is impossible. Her sister… would never. Could never. She doesn't care how unscientific it is. She just knows. So she turns over and goes to fitful sleep, knowing that she will probably wake in a few hours and have to make it one million and one.


	2. Angel Starr

Angel Starr

She doesn't start shaking until she's off the strand and out of the courtroom. She keeps walking briskly until she's out of view of the guards stationed at the door, and then she stops and leans her back against a side-street wall and focuses on breathing. She wants a cigarette, though she hasn't wanted one in years. Angel fumbles in her basket for a paprika potatoes lunch. Her fingers are trembling just enough that she takes a little too long untying the string around the box.

This was how it always was back when she was a detective. Not the paprika potatoes—the shaking and the craving for a smoke. The Cough-Up Queen was as hard and as steady as steel in the interrogation room, but once she had put the finger on a perp, she always needed to go outside for a light. A criminal changes a life with his crime… a murderer takes one. But it works both ways, see? Back in the day, when she testified or wrangled a confession, she changed a life. Or she took one. There were only two differences between what a murderer did, and what Angel did to murderers: what Angel did was just, and afterward her hands shook. Though she always saved those moments of vulnerability for when others weren't around, she has never denied them to herself. Indeed, by now she's flustered enough she can't quite manage the cellophane around the individually-wrapped spork she's trying to open. The point is—

The point is, it matters, what she did then. What she did today. It matters when one takes a life. It matters that Prosecutor Skye killed Bruce, and it matters that Angel, just now on the stand, killed Prosecutor Skye. Her slippery lawyer might drag it out as long as he can—and he will, she can tell—but in the end it will all come down to the truth. In the end it will all come down to her testimony. The cellophane is refusing to tear and her cheeks are beginning to get splotchy and her mind presents her with a sudden, unasked-for image of Lana in the electric chair and Angel's hand on the switch.

She stops. She closes her eyes and breathes in deeply through her nose. She really is tense. She hasn't called Prosecutor Skye "Lana" for two years, not even in her thoughts. She gathers her wits and strikes the business end of the wrapped spork smartly against the wall. The handle pops through the cellophane and she draws it out, crumpling the wrapping and letting it fall to the sidewalk.

She hasn't killed Lana. Angel makes herself think the name, makes herself picture the woman she used to admire so much. She hasn't killed Lana because Lana's already dead. Lana died a long time ago, and now there's nothing left but a filthy prosecutor. A murderer. Bruce's murderer.

Angel stares at the curb. She slowly slides the plastic utensil from between her lips and swallows her mouthful of mashed potatoes.

All the same, she thinks. It matters.


	3. Jake Marshall

Jake Marshall

He misses his gun.

They took it away when they demoted him—gave him a taser, which is about as far from a six-shooter as the sun-bleached longhorn bones are from the watering trough. A taser's no use to a cowpoke. Doesn't trust it. He leaves it at the security guard station most days. He trusts his fists. Trusts his knife.

But he misses his gun. Jake misses his gun 'cause someday he wants to put it to the head of the man who killed his brother, and cock it and see the fear in the outlaw's face. There weren't no fear on Neil's face when he died.

They told him it was Joe Darke, but a man knows. He knows like the cattle know how a storm is coming. You don't tell a man who it was that killed his own brother. You don't tell him he's wrong about something like that.

Jake Marshall sits in the shadows of his favorite saloon and feels the place on his belt where his gun should be. He misses that gun. He doesn't really need it, though—sometimes he doesn't imagine it happening with the gun at all. Sometimes the picture in his mind is of a posse, him and Angel and Bruce, dragging that no-good from his cell in the middle of the night. They'd string him up in a tall tree and watch him kick. Bruce wouldn't like it much, the jailbreak bit, but he'd want that son-of-a-gun dead too, trial or no trial.

Of course, Bruce doesn't want much of anything anymore.

Jake takes a swig of his sarsaparilla. Picture doesn't work so good, with Bruce gone. Nothing seems to work so good since yesterday. This old ranch hand's bones creak like they didn't used to, and that big old sky's a little cloudier, and the only time his brother's face is clear in his mind is when Jake pictures him frowning, all disappointed-like.

Neil never held muck stock by vigilantes, back then. For two years it's seemed like the only right thing in this whole wrong world to see death in the eyes of his brother's killer, but anymore he just don't know. These days he feels more like a desperado that won't come to his senses.

Jake shrugs at an unspoken question. He leaves a silver dollar by his bottle for the bartender, and walks out onto the street.


	4. Mike Meekins

Mike Meekins

Three sticks of gum. A screw. A pencil stub. Some lint.

The thing is, Officer Meekins tries to explain to the warden checking him in to the detention center, that he is really just a little lost lamb, sir. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, is all, that's the truth of it. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then he killed a man, that's the truth too. But sometimes the truth hurts. Sometimes the truth hurts your court case, for instance. But the important part, sir, Meekins keeps insisting to the warden as he empties out his pockets into the little plastic bin, the important part is that he is simply a poor little lost lamb.

A coffee stirrer. His apartment key. A quarter and two dimes.

He's killed a man. He doesn't say that out loud again, but he thinks about it, as he roots deeper in his pockets. He's killed a man with a knife. The man, whoever he was, is dead. Mike's sorry he's dead, he thinks as he tosses a few pennies out to join the quarter and dimes. He's really sorry. Maybe the guy shouldn't have been skulking around in the evidence room—no good ever came of skulking, Mike thinks that was in the orientation powerpoint probably—but he didn't deserve to die for it. Mike wishes he wasn't dead at all.

A rubber stamp. Two paperclips. A movie ticket stub.

"I think it's very strange how quickly things can change, sir," he gulps at the warden, who acknowledges with a grim nod. Mike knows, with more clarity than distinguishes most of the workings of his brain, what the man thinks he means. He thinks Mike means it's strange that one evening he could come home to his apartment and make a cold roast beef and mayonnaise sandwich and stick in a Bruce Lee movie and fall asleep in front of the TV with mayonnaise on his chin, and the next afternoon he could be in jail for murder.

A broken watch strap. An allen tool. A nub of chalk.

But that isn't it. Not entirely, at least. He means it's very strange that he, Mike Meekins, nothing but a little lost lamb, could have all this professional duty and kung fu movies and reflex and training seminars and roast beef and fear and shadowy mystery places jumbled up inside. He means it's very strange that they could be all inside him without him knowing, and that they could rattle against each other in such a way as to make him into a killer, make him into a stranger he doesn't understand.

A mustard packet. A button. A dead AAA battery.

"Lot of weird clutter you've got in there," says the warden.

"Sir, yes sir," agrees Officer Meekins, and doesn't mean his pockets.


	5. Miles Edgeworth

Miles Edgeworth

After court is dismissed for the day, Edgeworth hurries right back to his office and closes the door. He does not shake or fume or rage, but his face is very, very pale, and within the last hour he has come to look as though he hasn't slept for days.

He goes straight for the little kerosene hot plate at the back, by the window. The kettle is already full of water. Edgeworth tastes it with a tea spoon—it's fresh, doesn't taste of office air and the copper of the kettle—and looks around automatically for Gumshoe, even though he realizes the detective must have come in the last few minutes of the trial and left before Edgeworth arrived.

Miles is going to miss him.

He starts the hotplate and purposelessly clatters and rearranges the cups and containers on the tea tray.

_Dear Prosecutor Skye…_

Well. It won't be Lana receiving his letter, not after this trial. Edgeworth leans on his hands on the windowsill and stares down at the kettle heating on the gently buzzing hotplate.

After a few minutes, he pulls a small walnut case from a drawer in his desk and opens the lid to reveal a collection of teas in little silver tins. He selects an English breakfast variety and turns back around to the window. A few spoonfuls go into a perforated metal ball from the tea service tray, and the ball goes into the teapot. As soon as he began the process, his nervous energy disappeared; his motions now all happen quickly, smoothly, with no waste of time or movement. He uses the tea towel he keeps near the hot plate to grasp the handle of the kettle as he lifts it from the plate and pours it into the porcelain teapot, and then replaces the lid with a "clink."

Edgeworth turns back around to his desk to let the tea brew. He sits down in his enormous chair and pulls a piece of paper from a drawer. He writes in his careful, lacy hand, in perfectly straight lines on the unlined page.

_Dear Prosecutor Skye:_

_I wish I were writing to you._

_I wish I wasn't writing at all. But if I have to be writing to anyone to offer my resignation, effective immediately, I wish it were to you. _

_Together, we sentenced a man for a crime he didn't commit. His guilt on every other charge was irrelevant; if we couldn't sentence him for those crimes, we should have let someone else do our jobs._

_Together, Lana, we killed a man. _

_I wish it had been anyone else for my accomplice._

_Sincerely,_

Miles Edgeworth

When he is finished writing, he picks up the piece of paper and tears it, very carefully, twice lengthwise, then lines up the strips and tears them three times through. He goes over to his wastebasket and opens his hand, letting the pieces flutter down to join the rest of the rubbish.

He turns around to the window and pours himself a cup of tea, then sits back down at his desk and pulls out a new sheet of paper.

Esteemed Inquiry Committee… 


	6. Lana Skye

Lana Skye

She imagined it would be harder than it was.

Lana rubs her wrists where Angel has clamped the cuffs—they are still Angel's cuffs, nobody thought to swap them out—and thinks calmly about what that means. It means… she killed Bruce Goodman. That is the only thing it can mean.

For the past two years she has let Damon Gant define not only her actions, but her truth. He forbids her to tell other people the truth; and she does not know how to tell other people things she does not believe to be true. And so Lana Skye repeatedly, carefully, deliberately lies—to the police, to the judges, but most of all, to herself.

She sits in the back of the squad car now, and looks at her lap, and lies. She killed Bruce Goodman. She stabbed Bruce Goodman in the heart—now, that has the advantage of being true. She thinks about what Angel must have thought she'd seen. She imagines the scene again. She wraps her fingers around the hilt of an invisible knife and imagines Bruce in front of her.

But she lies about his eyes. She lies that his eyes were open, that they were open and alive and fixed on hers in horror as she grabbed a fistful of his trenchcoat in one hand and raised up the knife in the other. She lies that his mouth opened to form a word of pleading, to ask her Lana, please don't do this, Lana please, we were friends once, don't let it end like this, but he never got to say it.

She lies that the last word in his eyes was "Why?" She's glad that she never had to answer him, even in a lie, because she doesn't know what she would have said.

They'll know, of course. They'll tell her why she did it, why she stabbed him, why she ended up sitting in this squad car that smells like curdled milk, why she threw everything away.

But then, she supposes she knows that, too. She did it because of him.

I did it because of him, she whispers to the back of the officer's head, as he drives away from the parking garage. It's the one thing she'll never have to lie about to anybody.

It's the one thing about which nobody will ever think to ask her.


	7. Damon Gant

**Damon Gant**

The gym doors slide open with a cool, quiet sound, and the chilled indoor air spills out onto the sidewalk. A pair of expensive brown dress shoes stride smartly inside.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Gant. Here for a swim?"

"Yes indeed, my boy! Just a few laps over lunch and then back to the old grindstone, ahaha!"

"Very good. I'll have fresh towels put in the warmer for you, sir."

"Good lad, thank you!"

The brown shoes pass through a door and clop over a tiled locker room floor. Many a wealthy pillar of society—young, white-smiled men pulling off their ties, old men with liver-spotted bellies sagging over their towels—hail the wearer of the shoes as they pass.

"Afternoon, Chief!"

"Hoy, Damon! Didn't see you yesterday!"

"Oh, busy, busy, busy! Never a dull day," he responds. "No rest for the wicked, you know! Ho ho!"

Tanned, perfectly manicured fingers spin the dial on his padlocks. It clicks. The fingers pull it from the door latch and open the locker.

A gold watch is removed from a wrist and placed on the shelf inside. A leather wallet comes out of a trouser pocket and goes next to the watch. A gold brooch, now, unpinned from a red silk cravat, and then the cravat itself, unwound from a strong neck. Now the bright orange blazer—but what…?

The hands lift up the jacket for inspection by cold blue eyes that peer over smoky spectacles. A few rust-colored spots freckle the lapel, as though some substance, now dry, has been spattered there. The owner of the eyes and the hands and the shiny brown shoes tut-tuts in his throat.

"And I was so careful, too!" he murmurs. Shaking his head, he pulls a hanger from the rod inside the locker and buttons the blazer onto it. Then he hangs it back up, next to the spare suit in its dry cleaning bag. "Ah, well."

When he has finished changing into his swimming trunks, he closes the locker door and replaces the padlock. He walks toward the pool, stretching a tricep across his chest, and whistling.


End file.
